I blogged about the draft boundaries for the Northern Territory redistribution before I took a break back in June. At the end of July, the NT Electoral Commission released a second draft (not a final map), which contained changes to the boundaries of five electorates. Because the changes between two seats were reasonably significant, this triggered another round of consultation, before a final map is released later this year.
The Electoral Commission of Queensland (ECQ) last Friday released the draft boundaries for the Brisbane City Council election, due in March 2020. I’ve now put together a map of the electoral boundaries, and I’ve also calculated margins in all 26 wards, as well as primary votes for the three main parties.
The changes have helped Labor in a couple of marginal LNP wards, but overall has not had a big impact on Labor’s prospects of gaining control of the council in 2020.
Along with the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Brisbane City Council, the ACT has also been redrawing its electoral boundaries for the local Legislative Assembly, with the boundaries finalised in July.
In this post I’ll share a map showing the changes to the electoral boundaries, along with my estimates of the vote percentages for the bigger parties in each electorate before and after the redistribution.
The draft boundaries for the Western Australian state redistribution were released three weeks ago, but it has taken me some time to put together the map of the new boundaries, which are available for download now.
The commissioners implausibly managed to avoid moving an electorate from the country to the city despite a growing gap in enrolments.
It may have taken about 500 days to be published, but the Electoral Commission of South Australia finally published the complete statistics report for the 2018 state election two weeks ago, on July 31. This report was the first place to include the upper house vote count broken down by seat and by polling place.
South Australia is now the third state government to announce plans to tinker with the voting system for local councils this year, joining Queensland and Victoria.
The Australian Electoral Commission finalised the results of the 2019 federal election last week (now available at results.aec.gov.au) and this included the publication of data showing how primary votes for each candidate flowed on a two-candidate-preferred basis, as well as two-party-preferred flows for each party at a state and national level.
Once every three years, one year after the first sitting of parliament following the election, the latest population estimates are used to determine the entitlement of seats in the House of Representatives for each state.
In 2017, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory each gained an extra electorate, while South Australia lost a seat, leading to a net increase of one seat from 150 to 151.
In the wake of the federal election you may have missed a story about how the Victorian government is planning to change the way that Victorian local councils are elected, something which will be disastrous for local democracy and has come completely out of the blue.
Now that the election is over I will be taking an extended break. I won’t be doing any work on the Tally Room for the next six weeks.